Star Wars Fan Imagines If Anakin Skywalker Never Became Darth Vader

The entireStar Wars universe (as it is) essentially wouldn't exist without Darth Vader. But what would the series look like if Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker possessed willpower slightly more sturdy than a Pocky stick and resisted the pull of the dark side of the Force? One fan decided to offer their interpretation of that scenario.

Star Wars is ultimately a story of light vs. dark; good vs. evil. Even from the beginning, before A New Hope was even called A New Hope, and it looked like it would be a fun standalone story about a space boy, that binary was still there, with Vader right at the center. As the series continued, he became even more important to the story. But rather than asking who could beat Darth Vader in a fight, the question here is what would have happened if Anakin Skywalker never became Vader in the first place?

User Wildcardspades on the Star Wars subreddit cleverly visualized such a scenario with images from another movie entirely. Taking stills from the 2014 movie Outcast, they concocted some surprisingly authentic-looking shots of how Anakin Skywalker might have looked if he stuck around the franchise without the Darth Vader armor. It turns out all one needed to do was add lightsabers for that film to bear a striking resemblance to some more recent Star Wars offerings.

The edited shots show Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker during his teen years and beyond (even to this day, after returning to the role), looking particularly war-worn but still rather noble. Some of them are a bit goofy-looking with the added lightsabers but go a long way in helping create a tiny window into a universe where Darth Vader never killed so many Jedi and the actual Jedi Order remained standing. Or, at the very least, it offers a look at Anakin if he managed to resist the pull of the dark side even as the Order crumbled around him.

Outcast notably features Christensen as a young commander during the Crusades. Even in theming alone, that's already on par with