Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith #25 and its woman problem, some scattered thoughts.

[glompcat]

Before anything else, I want to say:

I did very much enjoy reading this title, and thought it was good. I just... have a lot of reservations around it and felt there were real issues with the execution on the whole.

Throughout the series Soule would toss out some genuinely interesting big ideas, but then just leave them (I do wonder how many of those ideas were his original ideas, and how many the Story Group told him to include and we will be seeing in other works). Which in a lot of ways was why it was fun to talk about - it presented ideas to run with and extrapolate, and since it just kinda dumped them and abandoned them we as fans got to pick those ideas up and play with them. I would have loved to see some payoff in this issue of those various tangents, but alas it was not to be. In a lot of ways this issue could be understood without having read any other issue of the comic, and when speaking about the final issue of a serialized story like this one that is a real weakness.

In addition to those frustrations, more than anything else I despaired over the treatment of women in this title.

Almost every single woman introduced throughout the run of this comic met a very violent end. I wish I could merely attribute that to its subject matter, and say that the men featured in the series met the same fate, however men generally had a much higher survival rate than women. By this title's end, there was perhaps just one named woman who had not been killed - and her survival is entirely dependant on the exact setting of the Fallen Order video game as she is rumored to be a main antagonist in that game. She was certainly implied to have met a particularly violent death in the comic, but if the game is set after 18 BBY then she must have survived. For me as a reader, this treatment of women is beyond unacceptable and cast a particularly dark shadow over the title as a whole.

It has been so incredibly frustrating throughout its run that this comic does have a lot of good stuff going for it (again I am genuinely a fan of this title), but then it just... is so bad when it comes to its treatment of women

Sadly issue #25 amplified those feelings, and in a manner made all the more infuriating because the means of correcting it would have been so unbelievably simple:

Simply have the phrase "only you could be so bold" or some other similar line echo in through Vader's vision. It would have been that easy to elevate this issue, to actual stick its landing, but with the total absence of Leia from Vader's visions of the future - paired with the inclusion of Kylo Ren - it felt like this issue was really grinding home those larger concerns. Personally I can only rationalize this as evidence that Vader never figured out the identity of his daughter after learning Luke had a twin sister on the second Death Star, but then again if he never was aware of that even in the Force, why would he hear the echoing words of her son? That really is an excuse, and I know that, but I really do want there to be sort of redemption for how Soule didn’t see Leia as a figure of interest for a vision like this, where Vader encounters his past and his future. Kylo is invited to this party, but his mother is not.

It isn’t a problem unique to Soule of course. I mean goodness knows fandom is far more interested in exploring the relationship and connections between Vader and Luke as opposed to Vader and Leia. Hell fandom is more interested in exploring connections between Vader and Kylo than they are in exploring Leia's connections to either of them.

So it isn’t like Soule’s exclusion of Leia from the Skywalker family drama and the Force vision is only to be found in this comic.

Had one of the echos in this vision sequence not been Kylo’s, I would not have minded Leia’s total absence the way I did. However, unfortunately, his inclusion makes her absence feel so much more apparent and deliberate. It sends the message that Leia truly means nothing to Vader/Anakin, not ever, not even after he joins the Force, yet Kylo somehow matters to him despite his lack of care for her.

I refuse to accept that.

It is also because of the overall treatment of women in this series that I find I have a lot of conflicting feelings about the vision version of Padmé encountered here (I very much come down on the side of her not being real). She is dressed in her death shroud essentially, she never speaks any words of her own and merely echos Vader/Anakin’s own words, and is spoken of by him like an object (”not again” he says, like he just lost his lightsaber - and I can not tell if that is a reflection of the fact that “this weapon is your life” or because he saw her as an object to possess or a combination of both), and then we see her die again - all the women are always dying.

Which just makes Shmi's appearance here all the more interesting. Shmi doesn’t die in this issue. As in, even in the visions of Vader's past featured through the issue - we don’t see her die.

In this issue we see Shmi Skywalker pregnant (with Darth Sidious hovering nearby, implying he is responsible), and we see her when little Anakin has a nightmare about Vader - soothing his fears and telling him it will all be ok.. but we do not see her death.

This woman, a woman who in so many ways had THE death that defines Vader - the woman whose death caused him to embrace the Dark Side for the first time, the woman whose death led to him performing his first acts of genocide - she is alive, and she is there for him, and I really don’t know what to make of that.

Literally every single other person in that vision world dies (save of course for Luke, who appears as a being of pure light who banishes Vader back to wakefulness - and Ahsoka but Vader does not know that and the vision frames things to make him think he killed her), but not Shmi.

She gets to live in Vader’s internal (?!?!?!?!) world!

I do not know what to make of that, nor do I know how much thought Soule actually put into that fact... except he put in the freaking "now this is Podracing!" line from Episode I in this issue and not her death so clearly choices were made when picking the defining moments of Anakin/Vader's life.

In part I think that is why I *want* at least that vision of his past as a child to have been a real nightmare Anakin had, so Shmi's appearance at the end of his nightmare could be real. That would bring the grand total of women we saw in this comic who did not die inflate to a possible grand total of two (and yes, we know Shmi’s fate, and counting her as someone who does not die feels a little strange when she was so dramatically fridged in Episode II).

Still, I did really enjoy following this title, the conversations that sprung up around it as each issue came out were incredible to engage in and I would not trade them for anything. I really am going to miss this series now that it is over, and truly do look forward to mulling over its contents with other fans for years to come.