The Star Wars community was rocked last month with the news of the seemingly inevitable death of Watto, the Toydarian junk dealer and former slave owner of Anakin Skywalker. But now the moment is upon us, and as with all good stories, things are a little more interesting than they first seemed.
The second issue of Legacy of Vader, out this week from writer Charles Soule, artists Luke Ross and Nolan Woodard, and letterist Joe Caramagna, takes a young Kylo Ren to Tatooine on the first stop of his new “let the past die” tour, a hot collabo with Darth Vader’s former attendant Vaneé as the two explore Vader’s titular legacy. The theme here, as it was throughout the first issue of the series, is less about Anakin’s life and his legacy: it’s about an awareness of narrative, a thing different from truth, and the power that can be held in projecting and presenting that narrative.
This is where Ren and Vaneé differ. Kylo, still in the throes of tumult he went through during the events of The Last Jedi, is intent on controlling his story, and the story of those that came before him, in a distinctly destructive manner: he tells Vaneé constantly that things about Vader’s history as Anakin Skywalker should be eradicated and erased; he literally takes his lightsaber and uses it to carve an obfuscating gash over Anakin’s name in a list of winners of the Boonta Eve Classic. To Kylo Ren, any history that does not make his grandfather the vision he has of him in his mind—the vision he needs in this moment of doubt—should simply no longer exist, just as he lies to himself about his own upbringing.
Vaneé, on the other hand, wields the power of the actual narrative of Vader’s history, revealing to Ren that he knows so much of Vader’s history because he’s been snooping on secret files Palpatine kept on his apprentice. Even as we know that Vaneé is misinterpreting what that past meant to Vader—that he held onto it for the pain and anger he derived from it, rather than it being the link that would ultimately see Anakin redeem himself—he again makes the case throughout here to Kylo Ren, that someone’s history just cannot be erased from our understanding of them.
It’s this ideological push-and-pull that takes us and our players to the moment Star Wars fans have waited for since it was previewed last month. Seeking to find out who dared to enslave the mighty Darth Vader, Ren has Vaneé take him to Watto’s junkyard, found empty and in a state of disrepair. It’s here we get the panel glimpsed in last month’s previews: imagined through Vader’s eyes, but indeed imagined, as Ren surmises the vision he has of his grandfather in his head. The junkyard is abandoned because Vader must have come back, at the apex of his control of the dark side, and slaughtered Watto. He must have done this, because that’s what Kylo Ren wants Vader’s legacy, and through it his own, to be about (to be fair to him, it is a fair guess to make about Vader as a person, albeit for very different and far funnier reasons than Ren could ever contemplate).
But that’s not the case, at least according to Vaneé. Vader had other things to do than be so beholden to his past in the way Kylo Ren imagines, apparently, and so, Watto lived. Perhaps still lives, even—Legacy of Vader #2 doesn’t definitively tell us one way or the other, just that Vader didn’t kill him. Watto could’ve died, he could’ve abandoned the junk trade and moved on elsewhere, we don’t know. Which is the point.
Star Wars fans love facts. Who’s dead, who’s alive, who did what, when, where, and how. The canonical interpretation of its story has driven reams of debate analysis, it has, in many ways, especially in the decade since it was overhauled and reset to be filled up with facts anew, shaped the consumption of that narrative above all else. The very fact of Watto’s death was arguably more important than Watto himself, simply for the intellectual curiosity that we didn’t know it. He never got a “canon” death in the old Expanded Universe, Legacy of Vader #2 teased that he might. And that mattered, because, well, Watto is a fact. He is a figure of merit in the facts of Anakin Skywalker’s life, a data point who stood out for the little we knew of and around him, and that mattered as much as whatever the story that would deliver those facts. I would imagine very few people actually cared whether or Watto was dead or alive before Legacy of Vader teased his fate, compared to the amount of people who craved the the what, the when, the where, and the how.
And yet, the fact that we do not know the fate of this character, one seemingly so important to the tapestry of a character who’s life we have spent nearly five decades being fascinated with, is far more interesting that the regurgitation of “Darth Vader went back to Tatooine and killed the uncomfortably antisemitic stereotype that owned him as a kid”. It’s not the first time Soule has done this kind of thing when writing about Vader, either—the “canon” of how his lightsaber came to be was given a banal origin story where people might have imagined some grander truth, to push back against this idea that every facet of Star Wars‘ story must have some predestined, powerful, important fact at its root.
It’s the very thing that sits at the heart of Legacy of Vader, a story that is, so far, less about that legacy and more about the way we tell stories—the ways they can be chopped and changed, the ways they can be obfuscated to fit into a preconceived assumption, and most crucially above all, that some parts of a story just aren’t as grand and important as we might have imagined. Sometimes a dead Toydarian is just a dead Toydarian. Except when they might be alive—and maybe the fact that we might never know the truth is for the best.
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